Click vs View Attribution

Click attribution credits a sale to your ad when the person clicked it before buying. View attribution credits a sale when the person only saw the ad, never clicked, and bought anyway.

You open Ads Manager and there are really two conversion numbers hiding inside the one you look at: the sales from people who clicked your ad, and the sales from people who merely saw it scroll past. The difference between those two is where a lot of arguments about Meta start. A click is someone taking an action, so crediting the ad is at least defensible: they saw it, they tapped it, then they bought. A view is just an impression. The person was shown the ad, did nothing, and bought later, and Meta still steps forward to say that impression caused the sale.

This matters because the two are not equally honest, and they do not mix in equal amounts across your account. View-through sales pile up fastest on warm, retargeting audiences, exactly the people who already know you and were likely to buy with or without the reminder. So a campaign that looks brilliant can be brilliant mostly on paper, its win built out of view conversions from people who were coming back anyway. Click-through sales are the harder, more trustworthy half of the number.

The trap is reading one blended figure and never splitting it. If you never separate click from view, you cannot tell whether an ad is genuinely finding new buyers or just standing next to sales that would have happened, taking the credit as they pass. Pull the two apart before you judge a campaign, especially anything pointed at an audience that already knows you.

A click is the ad earning the sale; a view is the ad standing near it. Do not pay for the second thinking it is the first.